The true solution to these problems is to be a parent. If you don't have the time to be a parent, then don't have kids. If you have kids, it's _your_ responsibility to keep them alive and healthy, both mentally and physically.
> Right now if you are not a tech-savvy parent your choices are: (1) deny children access to devices or severely limit that access, or (2) allow your kids to be raised by super-addictive infinite scroll brain rot feeds
> Now imagine you are a non-tech-savvy household with two parents who work. You can't really limit access since you can't supervise it enough, so your choice is now binary: no access, kids raised by brain rot and propaganda. Pick one. You have no control, no ability to whitelist, because not only do you not have time to deal with this but the tools often cost money and are imperfect and ineffective.
No access is the solution here. Tools are not expected to be perfect. The railing on a balcony is there for accidents, not to stop you from jumping off headfirst.
> Then you catch your 11 year old son watching extreme fetish porn that he lacks the maturity to contextualize, or hear him spouting off Nazi ideology or talking about how he's an "alpha male" and women should be his slaves. Or your daughter becomes anorexic by following influencers. Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring. These are the commonplace examples. There's a lot of much worse shit too, like sextortion of kids. Search for "764."
Take away their internet access.
If your child spends 90% of their time on phub, _take away their internet access_. If they spend 90% of their free time doomscrolling, _take away their phone_. If they need Internet access for school work, the can either do their school work at school, or you watch them do their schoolwork, or you find someone else to watch them do it. If you cannot do this, then you cannot be responsible for them and they should be removed from your care. This is basic mental health.
> That's why this push exists. It's not a conspiracy. It's because we -- our industry -- is an amoral shitshow that engineers addiction and refuses to police itself or provide parents with good tools to do so.
This isn't a third party policing the industry, this is telling the industry to police itself...by reaching inside my pockets to check my ID. Invasive security like X-ray machines at the airport aren't there for _your_ safety (regardless of what they say), they're there for _everyone else's_ safety: we're making sure you don't kill others.
> I'd also like to note that for the non-tech-savvy privacy is dead and has been dead for over ten years at least. If you are not tech-savvy your devices are recording everything about you and transmitting it to two dozen ad networks and data brokers.
> That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
That's a different issue, and it's also being addressed by legislation in some places that actually care (not in much of the US, unfortunately).
Privacy can be taught. We don't anymore. Nobody objected when platforms like Facebook started requiring real identities, but the simple answer to this is to not give out your information.